Monthly Archives: May, 2014

What is the origin of the false belief – constantly repeated by President Obama, the media and others – that almost all scientists agree about global warming?

Claims continue to be made that “97% of scientists agree that climate change is real, man-made and dangerous.” That’s what Secretary of State John Kerry told graduating Boston College students. It’s what President Obama said in his State of the Union address and a recent tweet.

Like this:

SETI uses the Arecibo’s 305-meter telescope — the largest in the world — to scan the sky for signals from alien civilizations all year round.Credit: Arecibo Observatory/NSF

The Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, or SETI, may be becoming more mainstream, as evidenced by this week’s House Science and Technology Committee hearing, which included testimony by two well-known SETI hunters, Seth Shostack and Dan Werthimer.

But the hearing took an odd turn when U.S. Rep. Chris Collins, a New York Republican, had the floor.

“I think I might ask the question everyone in this room wants to ask,” Collins said. “Have you watched ‘Ancient Aliens’ and what’s your comment about that series?”

The television show, broadcast on The History Channel, explores purported extraterrestrials’ visits to Earth over millions of years.

Shostak, senior scientist at the California-based SETI Institute, started off diplomatically.

“The public is fascinated with the idea that we may be being visited now, or may have been visited in the past, the so-called UFO phenomenon,” he said.

Then he got down to business:

“I personally don’t share the conviction that we are being visited. I don’t think that that would be something that all the governments of the world had managed to obfuscate — to keep secret. I don’t believe that.

“The idea that maybe we were visited during the time of the ancient Egyptians and so forth, keep in mind that in the 4.5-billion year history of the Earth, the time of the ancient Egyptians was yesterday. So again, why were they there then? What was it that brought them to Earth? I have no idea and I don’t find very good evidence,” Shostak said.

Skeptoid listeners are always asking for conspiracy theories that turned out to be true. Here’s the best I could come up with.

Ever since the earliest days of Skeptoid, listeners have been asking me for two things: Do an episode on paranormal claims that turned out to be true, and do an episode on conspiracy theories that turned out to be true. For both types of requests, I’ve always answered “Great, just find some for me.” Nothing. Ever. Crickets chirping. So when I went on the Joe Rogan podcast, which has an enormous conspiracy theory following, I asked straight out: Please send me examples of conspiracy theories that turned out to be true. I was buried in email… to the degree that such a thing is possible.

Judging conspiracy theories can be a tricky business. For one thing, they’re often uselessly vague. I can say “The government does things we don’t know about,” and then virtually anything can come out in the news and I can claim to have been right. For another thing, the world is full of real criminal conspiracies, and I can always point to any one of them and claim “Hey, this is a conspiracy theory that was proven true.” So I have a simple pair of requirements that a conspiracy theory must adhere to in order to be considered the type of conspiracy theory that we’re actually talking about when we use the term.

First, it must be specific enough to be falsifiable. This is the fundamental requirement that every scientific theory must comply with to be considered valid. By way of example, compare a vague version of the chemtrails conspiracy theory to a specific disprovable claim. You can’t just say “Some airplanes spray some unknown chemical.” That’s so vague that you could claim you were proven correct the next time a crop duster sprays a field. But if you say “United Airlines tail number NC13327 is equipped to spray VX nerve gas, and that one right there is spraying it right now,” then that’s a claim that can be disproven with a single inspection. You make a claim that specific, you’re proven right, I’ll stand behind you 100%.

Second, it must be known to the conspiracy theorist before it’s discovered by the media or law enforcement. Simply repeating what someone else’s proper investigation has led them to does not constitute developing a theory. Woodward and Bernstein did an intense investigation and put together evidence bit by bit until they had the whole story of the Watergate scandal; at no point did they sit back in their chairs, propose an elaborate conspiracy, then watch as every detail unfolded exactly as they predicted. If you want to impress me with your conspiracy theory, you have to discover it (in detail) before other investigators piece together the proof and make it public for you. Otherwise you’re just claiming credit for reading the newspaper.

So now let’s look at the most common “conspiracy theories proven true” that I was sent:

1. The Gulf of Tonkin

This was overwhelmingly the most common story sent to me from listeners of the Rogan podcast. It was the American excuse to enter the Vietnam War. A small naval battle took place between US forces and North Vietnamese torpedo boats, after which Congress gave President Lyndon B. Johnson the authority to order military action in support of certain Southeast Asian countries who were threatened by Communist forces. Basically, a thinly-veiled authorization for Johnson to go to war with North Vietnam.

USS Maddox in action against North Vietnamese torpedo boats (navy.mil)

The conspiracy part comes from the claim that the naval battle never actually took place, or that it was a fake “false flag” attack by American conspirators trying to give Congress the excuse they wanted. There’s probably a grain of truth to this. There was indeed one real engagement on August 2, 1964, in which planes and ships were damaged on both sides and the North Vietnamese suffered a number of casualties. There’s no doubt there. But it was the second attack two days later on August 4 that was fishy. American forces fired heavily on radar targets only, and nobody ever reported any visual sightings of North Vietnamese forces.

Throughout the day on August 4, as the action was unfolding, Captain Herrick of the destroyer USS Maddox cabled Washington a number of times, and reported in no uncertain terms that he believed there were no enemy forces. This information was public from the beginning. Even as Johnson was drafting his resolution, Senator Wayne Morse was holding public press conferences to reveal that the second attack was without evidence.

Provoking attacks may seem pretty unethical to most of us, but the fact is it’s been a common military tactic since the Romans and the Carthaginians. At no point were the details of the Gulf of Tonkin incident unknown, so it never existed as a conspiracy theory.

2. COINTELPRO

The FBI’s domestic Counter Intelligence Program was a terrible thing from the beginning. It operated since 1956, and also less formally for nearly 50 years before that. Their purpose was to discredit and harm American groups mainly associated with civil rights, characterizing them as hate groups that threatened national security. The program was blown in 1971 when a group of eight men, calling themselves the Citizens’ Commission to Investigate the FBI, broke into a small FBI office in a perfectly planned and executed raid. They seized some 1,000 documents detailing COINTELPRO operations and mailed them to newspapers. The FBI was unable to identify any of the burglars before the statute of limitations ran out, so they got away with it clean. As a result, the FBI was forced to terminate this often-illegal program.

The result was that people became afraid that radiation was melting all life in the Pacific Ocean, that cancer was slamming the West Coast, that fish were inedible, that the beach was a death zone, that Japan would be obliterated, that half of America would have to be evacuated, that giant marine animals were washing ashore, that the ocean was broken, that life as we knew it was over, and on and on.

And all of that horror was before “the plume” reached the West Coast.

The radiation leak from Fukushima actually has two components. One was the initial leak from the incident itself, which hit the US fairly quickly. The other was the much slower moving “plume” of radioactive water, the extent of which only became clear last year after Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO) admitted that 300 tons of runoff was leaking into the Pacific every day, with no way to stop it.

The New York Times’ map of the Fukushima Plume projection. (click image for larger view)

There were generally two reactions to the news that a plume of radioactive water was heading straight toward the West Coast:

Scientists did science. They researched, they set up studies, they developed computer models, they wrote papers, they disseminated their findings, they adjusted their hypotheses accordingly. The aim was to determine when the plume would arrive, what danger it carried, and what the next steps should be.

Panicmongers mongered panic. They wrote long blog posts trumping up the unknown dangers, they spread false stories, they relied on dubious sources, they sold anti-nuclear products, they accused researchers and government officials of covering up the “real story” of how bad it was. The aim was to make money, abolish nuclear power, and spread fear.

What the researchers looking into the plume found was, at least to me, fairly comforting:

Traces of Fukushima radioactivity would reach the West Coast of the US sometime in early 2014.

Because of the natural dilution of a relatively small amount of water in the hugeness of the ocean, they would be just that – traces.

However, there was no way to tell exactly when the radiation would arrive.

Therefore, monitoring of the radiation levels in sea life and water should continue.

While that’s happening, go about your business safe in the knowledge that you aren’t being fried.

So here we are, past early 2014. Almost halfway through the year, really. What’s the status of the plume?

For one thing, we still don’t know when the plume will hit, or if it actually has. The estimates are still a moving target.

Whenever the discussion of a dualist vs materialist model of the mind comes up, one common point made to support the dualist position (that the mind is something other than or more than just the functioning of the brain) is that the brain may not be the origin of the mind, but rather is just the receiver. Often an explicit comparison is made to radios or televisions.

The brain as receiver hypothesis, however, is wholly inadequate to explain the relationship between the brain and the mind, as I will explain below.

As an example of the brain-receiver argument, David Eagleman writes in his book Incognito:

As an example, I’ll mention what I’ll call the “radio theory” of brains. Imagine that you are a Kalahari Bushman and that you stumble upon a transistor radio in the sand. You might pick it up, twiddle the knobs, and suddenly, to your surprise, hear voices streaming out of this strange little box. If you’re curious and scientifically minded, you might try to understand what is going on. You might pry off the back cover to discover a little nest of wires. Now let’s say you begin a careful, scientific study of what causes the voices. You notice that each time you pull out the green wire, the voices stop. When you put the wire back on its contact, the voices begin again. The same goes for the red wire. Yanking out the black wire causes the voices to get garbled, and removing the yellow wire reduces the volume to a whisper. You step carefully through all the combinations, and you come to a clear conclusion: the voices depend entirely on the integrity of the circuitry. Change the circuitry and you damage the voices.

He argues that the Bushman might falsely conclude that the wires in the radio produce the voices by some unknown mechanism, because he has no knowledge of electromagnetic radiation and radio technology.

This point also came up several times in the 600+ comments following my post on the Afterlife Debate. Commenter Luoge, for example, wrote:

“But the brain-as-mediator model has bot yet been ruled out. We can tamper with a TV set and modify its behaviour just as a neurosurgeon can do with a brain. We can shut down some, or all, of its functioning, and we can stimulate to show specific responses. And yet no neurologist is known to have thought that the TV studio was inside the TV set.”

There are two reasons to reject the brain-as-mediator model – it does not explain the intimate relationship between brain and mind, and (even if it could) it is entirely unnecessary.

To deal with the latter point first, I have used the example of the light-fairy. When I flip the light switch on my wall, the materialist model holds that I am closing a circuit, allowing electricity to flow through the wires in my wall to a specific appliance (such as a light fixture). That light fixture contains a light bulb which adds resistance to the circuit and uses the electrical energy to heat an element in order to produce light and heat.

One might hypothesize, however, that an invisible light fairy lives in my wall. When I flip the switch the fairy flies to the fixture where it draws energy from the electrical wires, and then creates light and heat that it causes to radiate from the bulb. The light bulb is not producing the light and heat, it is just a conduit for the light fairy’s light and heat.

There is no way you can prove that my light fairy does not exist. It is simply entirely unnecessary, and adds nothing to our understanding of reality. The physics of electrical circuits do a fine job of accounting for the behavior of the light switch and the light. There is no need to invoke light bulb dualism.

The same is true of the brain and the mind, the only difference being that both are a lot more complex.

More importantly, however, we have enough information to rule out the brain-as-receiver model unequivocally.

The examples often given of the radio or TV analogy are very telling. They refer to altering the quality of the reception, the volume, even changing the channel. But those are only the crudest analogies to the relationship between brain and mind.

A more accurate analogy would be this – can you alter the wiring of a TV in order to change the plot of a TV program? Can you change a sitcom into a drama? Can you change the dialogue of the characters? Can you stimulate one of the wires in the TV in order to make one of the on-screen characters twitch?

Well, that is what would be necessary in order for the analogy to hold.

In 2003, Barbra Streisand frantically tried to censor pictures of her home in Malibu after someone posted them online. In 2003, millions of people saw pictures of Barbra Streisand’s home in Malibu. In what became known as the Streisand effect, attempts to suppress information about something usually backfires and leads to even more publicity for the supposedly secret thing.

The image of Streisand’s Malibu house that led to the naming of the effect. (image: Wikipedia)

There is a strong argument in the weather community that we should ignore the growing number of people who sincerely believe that there is a worldwide governmental conspiracy to control the weather through, among other means, “chemtrails.” Bringing attention to their cause, one may argue, only helps to attract more attention and thereby more adherents to this particular brand of anti-science.

While that is probably true for a small number of people, ignoring the conspiracy theorists only makes them scream louder for attention through the Streisand Effect. The best way to remedy a situation isn’t to bottle it up and pretend that it isn’t happening, but rather to shine light on it and expose the silliness for what it really is.

If you’re not familiar with the chemtrail conspiracy theory, let me fill you in real quick. The thin, wispy clouds left behind by high-flying aircraft are known as contrails, short for condensation trails. These clouds are left behind as a result of the warm, moist exhaust of the plane’s engines meeting the extremely cold temperatures of the upper atmosphere. It’s a similar principle behind why you can see your breath on cold mornings.

Contrails appear and disappear based on the moisture content of the air through which the plane is passing. If the upper atmospheric air is moist, the plane will leave a contrail that could last hours and spread out into a deck of cirrus. If the air is extremely dry, it might not leave a contrail at all.

Since about the mid-1990s, there’s a subset of people who believe that these contrails are really chemtrails, or trails of vaporized chemicals being sprayed into the atmosphere by aircraft that are really flying around with with tanks full of chemicals rather than passengers. These alleged chemtrails are the work of any number of groups: governments, companies, Jews, you name it. The ultimate goal differs depending on whom you ask, but the two biggest strains of thought are that the chemtrails exist to control the weather or make the populace sick.

For most people with a basic level of science education, the idea is absurd, but the conspiracy theorists truly believe that these chemicals are being sprayed to control the weather, make the population sick, or partake in other “geoengineering” activities.

Back to the theorists themselves. Take last week’s post on chemtrails, for example. It attracted a good bit of attention in the conspiracy circles, and quite a bit of ire directed towards me. Most of it is innocuous, with the typical name calling and impassioned cries of “you’re a shill and you’re wrong, we have the real truth!”

Underneath the vitriol, you can sense that there’s something…wrong, for lack of a better way to put it. For the most part these are not the rantings of people who have mental health issues or who are angry or have an agenda, but rather they are scared. They truly, deeply believe that there are people spraying us from above, and they are scared.

When you’re scared, you only accept what you want to hear from people. When the nurse tells you that the needle won’t hurt, you smile because that’s what you want to hear even though you know it’s going to hurt anyway. The conspiracy theorists don’t want to hear that their fears are irrational. They want a noble soothsayer to tell them that they’re not buying into a bunch of manure and that somehow, someway, it’s going to be all right because they have the truth.

California’s remote, beautiful, and foreboding Death Valley has held a mystery for almost a century: it has stones that seem to move on their own, when no one is looking. It happens at Racetrack Playa, a dry lakebed known for its “sailing stones.” This effect occurs at a few other places as well, though Death Valley is the most famous spot.

Heavy rocks like these seem to slide across the surface of Racetrack Playa in Death Valley National Park.

In their book “Mysteries of the World: Unexplained Wonders and Mysterious Phenomena,” Herbert Genzmer and Ulrich Hellenbrand state that “the perfectly flat, dry ground is scoured and scraped with paths that suggest these boulders are being moved along the ground… there is no indication of how this movement could have been brought about by outside forces, and no stone has ever been observed actually making its way across the ground.”

Not all of the stones in Death Valley move. Those that do only move every two to three years, and they don’t all move at the same time or in the same direction. In fact, some seem to have made abrupt 90-degree turns, judging from the tracks, which range from tens of feet to hundreds of feet long. Most of the stones are not huge boulders but instead range from about 6 to 18 inches (15 to 45 centimeters) in diameter.

Several theories have been proposed to explain this curious phenomenon, including some sort of localized, unknown magnetic effect. This theory has been discounted for a variety of reasons including that many of the stones do not contain significant amounts of magnetic elements such as iron, and that the stones should gradually assemble in one place — which they don’t. Some have suggested that the strong winds that blow through the area might move the rocks after the lakebed has become slick.

The most likely solution to the mystery involves a combination of wind, temperature and water. Although Racetrack Playa is a dry lakebed, it is not always dry; in fact, water collects on the surface after rainfall or when snow from surrounding peaks melts. Brian Dunning, a California researcher who discussed this mystery on his Skeptoid podcast, notes that when water is present and the temperature falls below freezing — as it sometimes does — a thin sheet of ice is created: “Solid ice, moving with the surface of the lake and with the inertia of a whole surrounding ice sheet, would have no trouble pushing a rock along the slick muddy floor… As the wind shifts and the flow ebbs, these ice floes drag the rocks across the slippery mud surface in zig-zagging paths, even moving heavy rocks and sometimes dragging some but washing past others nearby.”

NASA researcher Ralph Lorenz became intrigued by the enigmatic stones while studying Death Valley weather conditions. He developed a tabletop experiment to show how the rocks might glide across the surface of the lakebed.

Ralph Lorenz’s home experiment

“I took a small rock and put it in a piece of Tupperware, and filled it with water so there was an inch of water with a bit of the rock sticking out,” Lorenz told Smithsonian.com.

After putting the container in the freezer, Lorenz ended up with a small slab of ice with a rock embedded in it. By placing the ice-bound rock in a large tray of water with sand at the bottom, all he had to do was gently blow on the rock to get it to move across the water. And as the ice-embedded rock moved, it scraped a trail in the sand at the tray’s bottom.

Number 10 • Helen Duncan

Victoria Helen McCrae Duncan (25 November 1897 – 6 December 1956) was a fraudulent Scottish medium best known as the last person to be imprisoned under the British Witchcraft Act of 1735.

But to make our list, she convinced gullible people that a Papier Mâché doll, covered in an old sheet was a materialised spirit! This is the closest to a ghost from Scooby Doo that you will ever find!

Photograph taken by Harvey Metcalfe during a séance in 1928.

Number 09 • Derek Acorah

This very site (BadPsychics) was the worlds first media outlet/website to expose Derek Acorah as a fraud, and we could very literally do a Top 10 just for ridiculous moments Derek has been involved, but instead I have chosen this one.

A quick bit of history on this clip, as you will see the below clip is in colour, the original pre-recorded clip was broadcast “as live” and using a green filter to make it appear as if it was in night vision. Most Haunted would often do this on the Most Haunted Live events as a way to fool the gullible viewers.

BadPsychics originally released this clip as a way to prove the show would fake scenes, the clip was recorded from an un-encrypted satellite feed, which an associate of ours had tuned in on. We originally claimed that a member of the staff or “The Most Haunted Mole” had sent us a video tape, this was designed to cause disruption amongst the Antix crew, and it did with Karl Beattie holding many a meeting about this mystical figure, I took great pleasure in pulling the wool over his eyes!

Where to start with this horrible vile witch, a truly disgusting human being, who is now dead in a rather hot place.

“At around 7:45pm on April 21 2003 (the day before her 17th birthday), Amanda Berry left her job at a Cleveland area Burger King. She called her mother on her cell phone, told her that she had gotten a ride, and would call right back.”

She would then disappear.

Amanda’s mother Louwana Miller would appear on the Montel Williams Show a year and a half later, to get a reading from Sylvia Browne about her missing daughter, whereby Sylvia said the following.

“Miller: So you don’t think I’ll ever get to see her again?

Browne: Yeah, in heaven, on the other side.”

“On May 6th, 2013, Amanda Berry, along with two other young women (Georgina DeJesus and Michelle Knight), was found alive and being held captive in a house in Cleveland.”

Amanda Berry

Unfortunately, Amanda’s mother did not live to see this day.

So just think about that for a second, a Mother died believing her daughter was dead because Sylvia Browne told her so. If I believed in Hell, then I know that Sylvia Browne would be right there. But instead she is dead, and the only comfort we can take from that is that Sylvia can’t hurt any more people with her lies.

The concept is to build roads out of hexagonal plates of transparent hard material (tempered glass) with built in solar panels. You can also incorporate heating elements and LED lights. Buried alongside such roads could be a new energy grid, for transporting all that solar generated electricity.

Here is the vision as presented: With such solar freakin’ roadways we could generate much, if not all, of our needed electricity. We could replace telephone poles and hanging wires with buried lines, and upgrade our energy (and even information) grid while we’re at it.

The heating elements could melt ice and snow, removing the need for plowing or salting roads. Potholes or other damage could be easily repaired by simply replacing the hexagonal units, one at a time, as needed.

Inventors of Solar Roadways, Julie & Scott Brusaw. (YouTube)

The LED lights could be programmable, so that all road lines and traffic notices could simply be programmed in, and changed as needed. Parking lots could adjust spaces as needed – making bigger spaces or adding or removing handicapped spaces based on demand. Recreational areas can also be programmed to be different kinds of courts as desired.

Pressure sensitive plates can also be added, allowing for the road to light up, for example, when an animal is walking across the road, providing real-time warning for drivers.

This all certainly sounds great – just like the roadway of the future you always imagined, maybe even better.

OK – now here comes the skepticism. First let me say that I like the concept, and I’m glad some some research funding is being dedicated to this idea. I also have no problem with privately crowdfunding the idea. If people want to invest in this, go right ahead. I wish them well.

But this is also a good time to consider all the possible roadblocks (pun intended) and potential problems with such a technology. I am just going to list my questions:

I’m pretty sure he’ll blame his blathering on the heat. You have to wonder if privately, many leading climate alarmists are saying quietly “shut up John you are blowing our argument“.

(CNSNews.com) – Secretary of State John Kerry told an audience in Mexico on Wednesday that temperatures in Europe and in Vietnam were “unprecedented” and broke “every record that’s ever been seen.” However, although it was hot that day, he was off the mark.

It’s difficult to imagine the kind of suffering the family of Grace McDonnell has endured. In some ways it feels disrespectful to even believe you can, given the enormity of what happened to them. The same can no doubt be said for the parents and loved ones of all the victims of the Sandy Hook Elementary shooting. And yet Grace’s parents, in particular, have been subjected not only to the relentless pain of losing their young daughter, but, recently, to the psychopathic whims of those who believe their child never existed in the first place — those who believe that she was some kind of phantasm concocted by faceless nefarious entities trying to pull a fast one on the American public for who knows what reason. These people, Sandy Hook truthers, are a unique product of our time: self-righteous fools full of misplaced intellectual certitude, bolstered by digital misinformation and the confederacy of like-minded lunatics social media can provide to them.

It was one of these truthers, these conspiracy theorists to whom notions like logic and reason are meaningless, who stole a sign placed at a memorial playground honoring Grace McDonnell in Mystic, Conn. last week. This same person then called Lynn McDonnell, Grace’s still-grieving mother, and told her that he was on to her — that her child had never been real and was merely part of the elaborate hoax that was Sandy Hook. When news of this began making the rounds, most decent people responded as you would expect them to: with visceral outrage. I myself wrote a piece here in response to the provocation that attempted to call-out the monster responsible. It was titled “An Open Letter To Whoever Stole a Sandy Hook Victim’s Memorial Sign” and through The Daily Banter and The Huffington Post it received a good amount of attention and circulation. It even received, it seems, the attention of the person it was aimed at — the person who actually stole the sign.

On Tuesday, my co-worker and friend Bob Cesca called me out of the blue to pass along a pretty disturbing bit of information. He said that he had just taken a call from a relative of his who lives in Northern Virginia, and that this relative told him that a stranger had just shown up at his doorstep demanding to see Bob. The man apparently was hoping to talk to Bob in an effort to contact me. He claimed to be the person who had stolen the sign from Grace McDonnell’s memorial playground. He gave Bob’s relative a local public phone number and asked him to get in contact with Bob who would then get in contact with me and tell me to give him a call. My first thought upon hearing this, after being concerned for the safety of Bob’s family, was that whoever had appeared out of the blue in Northern Virginia looking for me wasn’t really anyone I wanted to speak to. He may have made a surprising — and somewhat disconcerting — amount of effort to get in touch with me, but that didn’t mean he was anything more than a garden variety nutjob who’d read my piece and wanted to take credit for an unconscionable offense in the name of getting attention. But I took down the number and called it as soon as I hung up with Bob.

The person who answered the line sounded lucid, which made it all the more unnerving that what he began saying right off the bat was a panoply of conspiratorial crazy. He asked me if I’d heard of the Illuminati. If I knew about Bohemian Grove. If I understood that my ex-employer CNN was helping to usher in the New World Order. He kept referring to Anderson Cooper as my former boss, for some reason. (I never worked on Cooper’s show and even if I had he wouldn’t have technically been my boss.) He insisted that during CNN’s Sandy Hook coverage, Cooper had held up an owl, which he said was the symbol of Bohemian Grove and those working to bring about a one-world government. When I told him that I personally knew about a dozen people who covered Sandy Hook and were on-scene in the aftermath of the shooting, he demanded to know if those people had actually seen any bodies. He insisted, among other supposed giveaways, that none of the parents of the Sandy Hook victims cried on camera, proving that they either weren’t actually grieving or were paid actors.

“Well, they can’t help but smile,” I said. “You would too if you were a member of the Illuminati.”

Many mothers say they “just feel better” about giving their child a hepatitis A shot they made in the kitchen themselves.

NEW YORK—A wave of concern reportedly spread through the pharmaceutical industry this week as several major drug companies reported a dip in quarterly earnings, with experts placing the blame largely on the growing trend of mothers choosing to make vaccines for their children at home.

According to medical industry observers, the homemade inoculations, which are often assembled from scratch in kitchens or atop home craft tables, have become increasingly popular due to their low cost, their do-it-yourself appeal, and rising parental unease over the quality and origins of the ingredients in mass-produced immunizations.

“With some simple mail-order biochemical compounds and a little bit of elbow grease, mothers can now make and administer their own vaccines in the comfort of their own homes, saving themselves the expense and hassle of visiting a pediatrician,” said Deloitte senior business analyst Deborah Eisenson, who noted that the trend is spreading rapidly as more mothers post recipes and images of their handcrafted vaccines to Facebook and Pinterest. “In certain parts of the country, it has already become commonplace to see a continuous-flow centrifuge right there next to the microwave and the coffeemaker on the countertop.”

She added, “More and more of today’s moms want to know exactly what’s going into their children’s bodies, so they’re learning how to generate antigens from a home-grown chicken embryo or bacterial culture and then inject the vaccine into their child’s arm or upper thigh tissue themselves.”

Sources confirmed that groups of mothers across the country confer daily in online forums to swap their favorite vaccine-production methods for pertussis, diphtheria, polio, and other viruses, often suggesting adding little touches to the suspending fluid—such as customized blends of chemical compounds and antibiotics—to make the vaccine their own. In blog posts, moms reportedly share tips on ingredient-sourcing, dosages, and how to keep inactive viruses from going bad in the fridge, as well as how to make vaccinations fun by getting their kids involved in the process of making them.

When interviewed, many mothers described quality time spent gathered around the kitchen table, with the whole family helping to grind recombinant proteins with mortars and pestles while a supervising adult helps purify the mixture through chromatography and ultrafiltration. Others reportedly do prep work ahead of time on Sundays so that during the week they can simply come home from work, stir in any necessary adjuvants or stabilizers, and have an inoculation ready to go.

In addition, YouTube has become a popular resource for mothers, who . . .

In 1977, astronomer Jerry Ehman may have stumbled across the most significant discovery in human history – or, at least, found one of the strangest observable things any human being has ever witnessed.

Jerry Ehman’s original handwritten “Wow!”Photo credit: The Ohio State University Radio Observatory and the North American AstroPhysical Observatory

All too often the use of the word “chemicals” in the news, in advertising and in common usage has the implication that they are bad. You never hear about chemicals that fight infections, help crops grow or lubricate engines. That is because the chemicals doing that job are called antibiotics, fertilisers and engine oil, respectively.

1. You can lead a chemical-free life

Despite the many products that claim otherwise, using the term “chemical-free” is plain nonsense. Everything, including the air we breathe, the food we eat and the drinks we consume, is made of chemicals. It doesn’t matter if you live off the land, following entirely organic farming practises or are a city-dweller consuming just processed food, either way your surroundings and diet consists of nothing but chemicals.

Compound Interest/Sense About Science

2. Man-made chemicals are dangerous

So we have established that there is no way to lead a chemical-free existence. But surely natural chemicals are better than synthetic ones?

Nope. Whether a chemical is man-made or natural tells you precisely nothing about how dangerous it is. Sodium thiopental, for example, is used in lethal injections but it’s about as toxic as amygdalin, which turns up in almonds and apple seeds. What makes one of these chemicals dangerous and the other part of your healthy five-a-day is quite simply the quantity that you consume.

Granted there are many documented cases of man-made chemicals that have been banned due to health concerns. But on balance chemicals have done far more good than harm. A good example is brominated flame retardants which are no longer used in furniture due to allegations of unpleasant side-effects. However these worries should be balanced against the estimated 1,150 lives saved because the chemical stopped furniture fires spreading.

Even substances that are upheld as terrible cases of chemical pollutants, such the pesticide DDT, have their place. The World Health Organisation support its use for control of malaria transmitting mosquitoes stating:

DDT is still needed and used for disease vector control simply because there is no alternative of both equivalent efﬁcacy and operational feasibility, especially for high-transmission areas.

Public controversy over the safety of fluoridation programs continues, in some towns leading to successful resistance to water fluoridation. As a public health issue, the scientific evidence for risks vs benefits should be at the core of this debate. A new study sheds significant light on this question.

Some anti-fluoridation activists will latch onto any claim they feel supports their opposition (common behavior in any context), and this leads to a great deal of nonsensical conspiracy-mongering. My favorite is the claim that public water fluoridation is all a plot to allow companies to cheaply dump industrial waste into the public water supply.

These sorts of claims distract from the real issues, and in my opinion does a disservice to the anti-fluoridation movement. I don’t mind the existence of opposition movements, even if I disagree with their position. They can serve a useful function in driving public debate and keeping the powers that be honest and transparent.

When they utilize highly emotional but irrational arguments, however, they relegate their own movement to the crank fringe, they marginalize what might be legitimate issues, and they can lead segments of the public into making fear-based and ultimately harmful decisions. They also miss their opportunity to run an effective and ethical opposition which focuses on legitimate scientific issues, and to effectively advocate for the rights of individuals. (Again, I am not saying I agree with any particular such campaign – but at least focus on the real issues.)

Public water fluoridation programs are a proven safe and effective method to improve oral health. It should also be noted that such programs do not always add fluoride to water – they deliberately adjust the level of fluoride in the water supply to optimal levels. Sometimes this involves reducing fluoride levels, but often involves adding fluoride.

The new study involves the safety of such fluoride programs, and specifically addresses the question of whether or not there is an adverse effect on neurological development, as measured by standard IQ testing.

This issue was recently in the news following the infamous “Harvard study” that claimed to show an adverse effect from fluoride on IQ. I discussed the study here – which was really a systematic review and meta-analysis. In short, the researchers looked at studies that compared high vs low exposure to fluoride and measured IQ. They found that the high exposure group had a lower IQ compared to the low exposure group.

There are two main flaws with concluding from this study that fluoridations programs are not safe. The first is . . .

I recently went to to see the ‘psychic to the stars’ Sally Morgan at Middlesbrough town hall, and if there was one word I could use to describe my night it would be ‘boring’. First off I feel I have to say that I personally don’t believe that psychics exist so, as you can imagine, I find people like Sally distasteful. This, however, was not the reason why I found the night boring as I do love this kind of thing and was genuinely excited to not only see her, but to gauge the audiences reaction to her show. The reason that it was boring was because the audience did not respond well to her after relatively early on in her performance, she showed the level of her psychic abilities.

For those who don’t know, psychic Sally Morgan is a British television and stage artist who claims to have (you guessed…

Gerson therapy is the name given to a regimen that claims to be able to cure even severe cases of cancer. The regimen consists of a special diet, coffee enemas, and various supplements. The regimen is named after Max Gerson (1881-1959), a German physician who emigrated to the United States in 1936 and practiced medicine in New York.

In 1977, Gerson’s daughter, Charlotte, co-founded the Gerson Institute, which oversees The Baja Nutri Care Clinic in Tijuana, Mexico. The clinic’s website has a very strange message on its front page for such a cheery, optimistic site: BNC reserves the right to refuse service to anyone, at anytime without notice for any reason. It is still illegal for a clinic to offer the Gerson treatment as a cancer cure in the U.S. Charlotte is not a medical doctor but she was given on-the-job training in her father’s clinic. She trains physicians in the Gerson method, lectures widely on the benefits of the therapy and the evil forces trying to suppress it, and has written a number of pamphlets centering on testimonials from various people who claim to have been cured of their cancer. She’s co-authored a book on the Gerson way and is joined in her endeavor by her son Howard Strauss. Howard has a degree in physics and has written a biography of his grandfather called Dr. Max Gerson: Healing the Hopeless. Mother and son believe that Howard’s wife was cured of cancer by Gerson therapy.*

Gerson says he started on the road to his regimen when his migraines went away after going on a vegetarian and salt-free diet. The diet in the regimen eventually came to include lots of juice from organic fruits and vegetables, and to exclude coffee, berries, nuts, dairy products, tap water; bottled, canned or processed foods; and cooking in aluminum pots and pans. The supplements came to include linseed oil, acidophilus-pepsin capsules, potassium solution, laetrile, Lugol’s solution (iodine/potassium iodine), thyroid tablets, niacin, pancreatic enzymes, royal-jelly capsules, castor oil, ozone enemas, vaccines, and vitamin B12 mixed with liver.* The liver injections were removed from the regimen after it became clear that it was making some people sick.*

Who was Max Gerson and why would anyone with cancer follow his advice of massive quantities of vegetable juice and daily coffee enemas? The second question is easy to answer. The therapy appeals to those who believe a “natural” cure exists for cancer and most other diseases but special interests (known in some circles as “they”) have suppressed these cures. It appeals to cancer patients who are extremely fearful of or violently opposed to surgery, radiation, or chemotherapy. It appeals to cancer patients who have been told that science-based medicine has no treatment for them and who are desperate to continue living. The first question requires a longer answer.

If there is a group of people I hate arguing with even more than I hate arguing with young-earth creationists, it’s the conspiracy theorists.

At least the young-earth creationists just think I’m working for Satan, a charge that I can understand, considering their view of things. Sure, we don’t accept the same ground rules for proof (evidence versus revelation); sure, we have different conclusions regarding where you can apply the laws of scientific inference (damn near everywhere versus only places where it doesn’t conflict with Holy Writ).

But at least we can talk. The conspiracy theorists, you can’t even have a civil discussion with. They accuse you of either being stupid or else working for evil humans, both of which are in my opinion worse than working for Satan because stupidity and evil humans actually exist. The worst part, though, is that they pretend to accept the principles of rational argument, but then when it comes down to the point, they don’t, really. You can bring out the best-researched study about the efficacy and safety of vaccines, the most convincing argument that 9/11 and Sandy Hook were not “inside jobs” or “false flags,” the most persuasive evidence out there that HAARP has nothing to do with raising tsunamis or causing earthquakes.

And where does it get you? They just write you off as a dupe or a shill. It’s the ultimate example of the False Dilemma Fallacy; if you don’t agree with us, you’re one of…. Them.

The problem in this country has gotten so bad that Kurt Eichenwald did a big piece in Vanity Fair on the topic this week, and you all should read it. In fact, everyone in the civilized world should read it, because it’s brilliant, even though it’s depressing. I’ll give you a brief passage from it, but then I want you to go to the link and read the whole thing:

(W)e have become scientific and political illiterates, and no nation can survive on a bedrock of such delusional stupidity. Of course, the 26 percent (or more) won’t believe me, if they manage to read this. I’ll just be deemed an “elitist” for daring to suggest that demon science and data, rather than ridiculous conspiracy theories, should be used to judge reality. So, it may be a losing battle, but we should all try. I don’t want to be forced, someday, to stand by as the rest of the world renames our nation “America the Ignorant.”

It’s a bit of a coincidence that I should come across this when I did, because it came on the heels of another article, one sent to me by a loyal reader of Skeptophilia, that details one of the most pervasive and bizarre conspiracy theories out there: that the US government in general, and FEMA (the Federal Emergency Management Agency) in particular, are laying plans to kill us all.

Code ICD 9 E 978 Makes Execution by Guillotine Legal Under Obamacare. The specific code sent to me will make any American’s hair stand up on the back of their neck. The code is ICD 9 E 978. After reading this code I decided that it was my duty to investigate further and get to the bottom of why we have a medical code in the United States for “Legal Execution.” The Jesuits are behind most conspiracies and this one is no different… Execution by Guillotine is painless.

And I’m thinking: what the fuck does Obamacare have to do with this? Was that just something extra to throw in, along with the Jesuits for some reason, the way that the anti-GMO crowd will throw in the name “Monsanto” as a stand-in for Hitler?

At least they tossed us the cheerful tidbit that getting your head sliced off is painless. I’m relieved, actually, considering what other methods they could have chosen.

The intellectual dishonesty of the Thermageddonites is well demonstrated in a particularly fatuous piece entitled Eight Pseudoscientific Climate Claims Debunked by Real Scientists at the hand-wringing-and-hysteria website billmoyers.com.

Like this:

Right now, the best candidates we have for finding alien life are some sort of fossilized bacteria on Mars. If we’re lucky, there might be microbes on Europa, though it won’t be easy to get to them.

In centuries past, people knew a lot less about space, so they came up with significantly more elaborate possibilities about the aliens we might find there.

10 • Camille Flammarion’s Alien Afterlife

French astronomer Camille Flammarion supported Percival Lowell’s theories about canals on Mars. When some scientists did an experiment suggesting Lowell was seeing an optical illusion, Flammarion repeated the experiment to try and prove them wrong.

He believed Martians would be superior humans, due to how low a bar we’d set through our habit of war and how “we cannot even agree on a universal calendar.” He suggested creatures on the red planet may have tried to communicate with us when we were still hunting mammoths, but they got no response and gave up. He concluded, “I would like to go to Mars, it must be an interesting place.”

He believed the Moon was likely inhabited. He speculated about aliens in light of Darwin’s groundbreaking theories and came up with the idea of a race of sentient plants that combine digestion and respiration into one process. A mystic, he believed that after death, the soul would travel from one planet to another in pursuit of perfection. That belief had started in the Enlightenment, and Flammarion kept it alive into the 20th century.

This belief is reflected in a piece of fiction he wrote, in which he describes a dead man named Lumen finding himself on a far world. Lumen arrives at a mountain, covered with palaces woven from trees, from which he can see the Sun and planets as distant stars. At the summit of the mountain town, 20 or 30 old men stand staring into the sky, criticizing the terrible human violence their magical eyes can see going on in Paris.

9 • Mormon Moon Men

Many tales relate to Mormon beliefs of life on other worlds, some more reliable than others. The most common, often put forward by critics of the church, is that Joseph Smith claimed that the Moon was inhabited. These Moon-men dressed like Quakers and lived for 1,000 years. The story was first told by a Mormon named Oliver Huntington, who’d written it in his journal in 1881.

It’s not a reliable record of what Smith believed, but it’s not implausible. Sermons from Joseph Smith’s brother Hyum in 1843 said: “Sun and Moon is inhabited.” Brigham Young, the church’s second president, preached in 1870 that there was “no question” that the Sun was made to give light to its own inhabitants, as well as to those on Earth and elsewhere.

8 • William Herschel

British scientist William Herschel is one of the most important astronomers in history. Among his discoveries were Uranus, several of Saturn’s moons, infrared radiation, and binary star systems. He was also obsessed with the idea of extraterrestrial life, particularly on the Moon.

In the 1770s, he wrote in his journal that he’d seen forests and pastures on the lunar surface. He later believed he’d seen canals and patches of vegetation. Yet it was craters that most caught Herschel’s imagination. He built the largest telescope in history to that point, and he saw perfectly round structures unlike anything anyone had seen before. He called them “circuses” and pondered “perhaps, then on the Moon every town is one very large Circus?”

Herschel’s thoughts on Lunarians (as he called them) weren’t known until after his death. Some of his contemporaries were less shy. Franz von Paula Gruituisen published three papers in the mid-1820s detailing the colossal buildings, animal tracks, roads, cities, and temples he’d found. Yet they all paled in comparison to the discoveries attributed to William Herschel’s son John, himself a famed astronomer, who was said to have built a telescope powerful enough to study lunar insects. Sadly, those claims were part of one of history’s most infamous hoaxes.

Autism cure promoters are people who claim they “cure” people with autism.

The claims made by these people are very conversational, both in their claims about autism and it’s causes, and what they say can cure autism.

Now there are a lot of different things I have noticed about autism cure promoters, but I’ve narrowed it down to five different things.

So here are five things I’ve noticed about autism cure promoters:

5. They’re closely aligned with the anti-vaccination movement.

Autism cure promoters and the anti-vaccination movement are pretty much like peas in a pod. Anti-vaccers often promote these so called “therapies” that the autism cure promoters claim can cure a person with autism, and autism cure promoters also tend to publish on their websites anti-vaccination movement propaganda, mainly in the form of claims that certain chemicals in vaccines can cause autism.

Some of these promoters also like to use certain words that the anti-vaccination movement also uses inorder to sell their therapies to people with autism or have autistic children, such as “vaccine damage”, “vaccine injury”, or “autism epidemic”.

They also ignore the fact that such words are not only incorrect and misleadinf, but very insulting to people with autism. Ofcourse they’re not actually promoting their therapies towards people with autism, they’re really promoting them towards parents of children who have autism and just want their kids to be normal.

4. They exploit the fears and desires of parents with autistic children.

For some parents when a child is diagnosed with autism it can be devastating to them, and the fact that there is no way to cure autism can make that devastation to them even worse. Then comes along someone who claims they can do things that the medical industry cannot do and can “cure” their child of autism, and if they don’t know any better they may take that person up on their offer.

A person who is misinformed about what autism is and what causes autism, mixed with both the fear of what will happen to their child and how their life will turn out due to their autism, combined with their desire to have a “normal” child, would be very temped by someone whom claims they can cure their child of autism and give them a chance at a normal life and be willing to pay whatever price they can inorder to do so.

The people who are promoting these so called autism cures know this and know that they can exploit these fears and desires to sell people products and services that scientific research has concluded are useless at curing autism.

3. They’re trying to give a simple solution to a complex issue.

Autism is a neurological disorder, and like all neurological disorders it’s complex without any simple solutions.

Autism cure promoters try to make it look like autism is caused by toxins in the body, and that by removing these toxins a person whom has autism one can be cured of autism.

While some toxins can cause neurological disorders, all legitimate scientific research has shown that autism isn’t one them.

While the actually cause of autism is still technically unknown, most scientists who study autism agree that it’s . . .

But one more article, one more peer-reviewed paper has just been published that should slam the door shut on the vaccine-autism myth. But I am not naïve, I know that the antivaccination cultists will invent some logical fallacy to continue to lie about the tie between vaccines and autism. The research, published in the journal Vaccine, is a meta-analysis of five cohort studies involving 1,256,407 children, and five case-control studies involving 9920 children. As I’ve written before, meta-analyses form the basis, the deep foundation, of the scientific consensus, and they are the highest quality scientific evidence available. This study is like a gigantic clinical trial because it rolls up the highest quality data from those millions of subjects to develop solid conclusions.

Many identical twins — perhaps as many as one in five — claim to share a special psychic connection. About one out of every 30 babies born in the United States is a twin, and identical twins are especially interesting because they have the same genes and are alike in many ways. Brothers and sisters can be close, but some twins claim to know what the other is thinking or feeling. It’s an intriguing idea, but what’s the truth behind it? Coincidence, psychic powers or something else?

This sort of psychological connection isn’t necessarily mysterious, of course: any two people who know each other very well and who have shared many common experiences — including non-twin siblings, old married couples, and even best friends — may complete each other’s sentences and have a pretty good idea about what the other person is thinking.

The idea of twin telepathy has been around for well over a century. It appears, for example, in the 1844 Alexandre Dumas novella “The Corsican Brothers.” It tells the story of two once-conjoined brothers who were separated at birth yet even as adults continue to share not only thoughts but also physical sensations. As one twin describes, “However far apart we are now we still have one and the same body, so that whatever impression, physical or mental, one of us perceives has its after-effects on the other.” The 2013 best-selling novel “Sisterland” by Curtis Sittenfeld also tells the story of twin girls who share a psychic connection.

Most of the evidence for twin telepathy is not scientific but instead anecdotal. For example, in 2009 a British teenager named Gemma Houghton was in her home when she suddenly had a feeling that her fraternal twin sister, Leanne, needed help. “I just got this feeling to check on her, so I went up to the bathroom and she was under the water,” she said. Gemma found Leanne in a bathtub, unconscious. She had suffered a seizure and slipped under the water, nearly drowning. Gemma called for help and administered first aid, saving her sister’s life.

Every skeptic’s new favorite website is Spurious Correlations. The site is brilliant – it mines multiple data sets (such as causes of death, consumption of various products, divorce rates by state, etc.) and then tries to find correlations between different variables. The results are often hilarious.

The point of this exercise is to demonstrate that correlation does not necessarily equal causation. Often it is more effective to demonstrate a principle than simply to explain it. By showing impressive looking graphical correlations between phenomena that are clearly not related (at least proposing a causal connection superficially seems absurd.), it drives home the point that correlation is not enough to conclude causation.

I think most people can intuitively understand that funding on science, space, and technology is unlikely to have a meaningful causal connection to suicide by hanging, strangulation, or suffocation.

Yet – look at those curves. If a similar graph were shown with two variables that might be causally connected, that would seem very compelling.

There are a couple of points about this I want to explore a bit further. First is the important caveat that, while correlation is not necessarily causation, sometimes it is. Two variables that are causally related would correlate. I dislike the oversimplification that is sometimes presented: “correlation is not causation.” But it can be.

The second point is a statistical one. The important deeper lesson here is the power of data mining. Humans are great at sifting through lots of data and finding apparent patterns. In fact we have a huge bias toward false positives in this regard – we find patterns that are not really there but are just statistical flukes or complete illusions.

Correlations, however, seem compelling to us. If we dream about a friend we haven’t seen in 20 years then they call us the next day, that correlation seems uncanny, and we hunt for a cause. We aren’t even aware of the fact that . . .

“It’s not mentioned anywhere in the peer-review literature. It’s not ever taught in a weather or climate course. It never even existed prior to the 90’s. Nobody had even ever mentioned the term prior to the 90’s,” Dr. Mercer said.

“And the process that forms the contrails is very well understood,” Dr. Mercer said.

Cereologists don’t all agree on how crop circles form, but there are some wild theories out there, including freak weather and UFOs. Also, hoaxers confessed to making hundreds of circles. Tune in to learn more about the theories surrounding crop circles.

It was perhaps a certainty that the most famous royal celebrity death of the twentieth century would attract conspiracy theories, so it’s not surprising that that’s exactly what happened when Diana, Princess of Wales died in a car accident in 1997. She’d been divorced from Charles, Prince of Wales for about a year, and she and her boyfriend Dodi Al-Fayed were in Paris. The story of that evening had all the elements of an international caper: money, royalty, luxury, celebrity, sex, drugs, and death. How could this calamity, at once a small family tragedy and the greatest show on the worldwide stage, have not attracted attention of every kind: sadness, anger, outrage, and charges of crime and conspiracy?

Diana and Dodi had just spent nine days aboard the Al-Fayed family’s enormous motoryacht, the Sonikal, off the French and Italian Riviera. They stopped to overnight in Paris at the Ritz Hotel, owned by Dodi’s billionaire father Mohamed Al-Fayed. After midnight, they left the hotel and headed to an apartment that he also owned, a short drive away. They were in the back seat of a Mercedes S-Class sedan driven by Henri Paul, the hotel’s deputy head of security. Paul was drunk and on anti-depressants. In the front passenger seat was Trevor Rees-Jones, Dodi’s bodyguard. None of them were wearing seatbelts. As so often happens to members of the royal family, they were pursued by a number of paparazzi photographers in other cars. Paul drove faster to try and get away from the paparazzi. Just before the Mercedes started down the ramp into an underpass tunnel, Paul swerved slightly to avoid a slower car, but grazed it. He then began to fishtail, at which point he effectively lost control of the Mercedes. Once inside the tunnel, going about 100 kph, the car slammed into a vertical pillar head on. It spun and struck the wall, facing backward. Half a dozen paparazzi were on the scene and remained until authorities arrived four minutes later. Seven of them were arrested. It was 12:30 in the morning.

Paul and Dodi died on impact. Trevor Rees-Jones suffered severe facial and head injuries, ultimately recovering but with no memory of the accident. Diana was fatally injured and died some three and a half hours later at the hospital. Six months later, Mohamed Al-Fayed claimed his son and Diana had been murdered by British intelligence. Why? Because the Al-Fayed family was Muslim, Diana and Dodi had been secretly engaged, and the British could not bear the royal blood to be so tainted. Three years later Mohamed added that the couple had revealed only to him that Diana had even been pregnant with Dodi’s child. Specifically, Mohamed charged that MI6, the British Secret Intelligence Service, conceived, choreographed, and executed the car crash to murder the pair.

Astrophysicists talk about the process of accretion, where microscopic particles of dust and ice stick together (largely through electrostatic attraction), leading to the formation of disks of matter around the parent star than can eventually form planets. As the clumps of dust get larger, so does their gravitational attraction to nearby clumps — so they grow, and grow, and grow.

Conspiracy theories also grow by accretion.

One person notices one thing — very likely something natural, accidental, minor, insignificant — and points it out. Others begin to notice other, similar phenomena, and stick those to the original observation, whether or not there is any real connection. And as the number of accreted ideas grows, so does the likelihood of attracting other ideas, and soon you have a full-blown gas giant of craziness.

The whole chemtrail conspiracy theory nonsense began with some dew in a glazed ceramic bowl and a reporter that failed math class.

It seems to be, for example, how the whole nonsense about “chemtrails” started. A reporter for KSLA News (Shreveport, Louisiana) in 2007 was investigating a report of “an unusually persistent jet contrail,” and found that a man in the area had “collected dew in bowls” after he saw the contrail. The station had the water in the bowls analyzed, and reported that it contained 6.8 parts per million of the heavy metal barium — dangerously high concentrations. The problem is, the reporter got the concentration wrong by a factor of a hundred — it was 68 parts per billion, which is right in the normal range for water from natural sources (especially water collected in a glazed ceramic bowl, because ceramic glazes often contain barium as a flux). But the error was overlooked, or (worse) explained away post hoc as a government coverup. The barium was at dangerous concentrations, people said. And it came from the contrail. Which might contain all sorts of other things that they’re not telling you about.

And thus were “chemtrails” born.

It seems like in the last couple of months, we’re seeing the birth of a new conspiracy theory, as if we needed another one. Back in 2011, I started seeing stories about the Yellowstone Supervolcano, and how we were “overdue for an eruption” (implying that volcanoes operate on some kind of timetable). At first, it was just in dubiously reliable places like LiveScience, but eventually other, better sources got involved, probably as a reaction to people demanding information on what seemed like a dire threat. No, the geologists said, there’s no cause for worry. There’s no indication that the caldera is going to erupt any time soon. Yes, the place is geologically active, venting steam and gases, but there is no particular reason to be alarmed, because volcanoes do that.

Then, last month, we had people who panicked when they saw a video clip of bison running about, and became convinced that the bison had sensed an eruption coming and were “fleeing the park in terror.” And once again, we had to speak soothingly to the panicked individuals, reassuring them that bison are prone to roaming about even when not prompted to do so by a volcano (cf. the lyrics to “Home on the Range,” wherein the singer wishes for “a home where the buffalo roam,” despite the fact that such a home would probably face animal dander issues on a scale even we dog owners can’t begin to imagine).

But the accretion wasn’t done yet. The bison were too running from the volcano, people said. So were the elk. And then the real crazies got involved, and said that the government was already beginning to evacuate people from a wide region around Yellowstone, and relocating them to FEMA camps where they are cut off from communicating with anyone. And when there was an explosion and fire at a gas processing plant in Opal, Wyoming two weeks ago, 150 miles from Yellowstone, and the whole town was evacuated, the conspiracy theorists went nuts. This is it, they said. It’s starting. The government is getting people out, because they know the whole freakin’ place is going to explode.

One of the ongoing memes, tropes and fabrications of the vaccine deniers is somehow, somewhere, in some Big Pharma boardroom, a group of men in suits choose the next vaccine in some magical way, and foist it upon the world just to make billions of dollars. And while magically concocting the vaccine brew, these pharmaceutical execs ignore ethics and morals just to make a profit on hapless vaccine-injured victims worldwide.

It’s one of my favorite tropes of the antivaccination world.

The vaccine deniers pollute the internet with their screeds about the profits of vaccines. One of them said, “measles expert Offit has already made millions of dollars profit from his ties to vaccines and the measles MMR vaccine maker Merck.” Using a childish ad hominem, the article calls him, Dr. Paul “For Profit” Offit. Seriously, that’s how you’re going to “prove” that vaccines are a Big Pharma conspiracy? A 3rd grade playground tease? That’s the best you can do.

You can find whole threads of tedious commentary about vaccine profits on any typical anti-vaccine forum. One of the more illogical claims is that “maybe vax companies see vaccines as more of an investment? Break mostly even on what the vaxes cost to make and sell, but make a bank load of money on treating all the chronic problems they cause!” Of course, that would be a business strategy that would be laughed out of the secret Big Pharma boardroom, because they know that vaccines don’t cause chronic problems. The vaccines prevent it.

What is infuriating about these rants by the antivaccine cult is that not only that their scientific knowledge about vaccines is ridiculous, so is their business knowledge.

[ . . . ]

[A]re vaccines as profitable as other Big Pharma endeavors? And second, if Big Pharma execs were truly immoral and corrupt, would selling vaccines actually be the best business strategy?

There are a variety of reasons to learn some science. First is, it’s cool, and is the only game in town when it comes to understanding what’s actually going on around you in the natural world. Second, there are some issues we’re facing (climate change and genetic modification come to mind) that you can only evaluate properly if you understand the science behind them. These issues are having an increasing impact on humanity, and most of us are coming around to the idea that handling them properly will require some deep thought — deep thought that requires you to understand what the research actually says.

The third reason is that some knowledge of science will keep you from falling prey to purveyors of bullshit.

Physician and best-selling author Deepak Chopra has an empowering message: You can actually modify your own genes through your actions and behaviors.

Purveyor of bullshit

Well, Dr. Chopra, it may be “empowering,” but that doesn’t change the fact that it’s wrong. Modifying your gene expression is not the same thing as modifying your genes. Your body responds to changes in environmental conditions all the time — but that is altering the expression of the genes you already have, not making any sort of permanent changes to the genes themselves.

Alteration of gene expression happens continuously, throughout our lives. If you hadn’t altered gene expression as you developed from a single-celled fertilized egg, for example, you would right now be an amorphous blob of undifferentiated cells, and you would be unable to read this post, because you wouldn’t have a brain.

Now, lest you think that it’s just the writer at HuffPost who got it wrong, and that the passage above was taking something that Dr. Chopra said out of context and making it sound like he believes that experience alters your genes, here’s an actual quote that proves otherwise:

“We are literally metabolizing something as ephemeral as experience or even meaning,” Chopra said in an interview this week at the Milken Institute Global Conference in Beverly Hills, California. “If somebody says to me, ‘I love you,’ and I’m in love with them, I suddenly feel great, and I make things like oxytocin and dopamine, serotonin, opiates. And if someone says to me, ‘I love you,’ and I’m really thinking they’re manipulating me, I don’t make the same thing. I make cortisol and adrenaline.”

First off, what does “literally metabolizing… experience” even mean? Metabolism is one of those words that’s used in common parlance in a variety of ways, but for which scientists have a precise definition. You can metabolize the protein in your dinner, but “metabolizing experience” is a meaningless phrase — and it’s almost funny that he put the word “literally” in front of it.

Chopra, of course, has become notorious for this kind of thing. He once said, in a talk, “We are each a localized field of energy and information with cybernetic feedback loops interacting within a nonlocal field,” a phrase that is kind of admirable in how tightly it packs meaningless buzzwords together. He specializes in a style of speech and writing that I call “sort of science-y or something” — using words like frequency and quantum and resonance in vague, handwaving ways that have great appeal to people who aren’t trained in science, and who don’t realize that each of those words has a precise definition that honestly has nothing to do with the way he’s using them. In fact, he’s so well-known for deep-sounding bullshit that there is an online Deepak Chopra Quote Generator, that strings together words to create an authentic-sounding Chopra Quote. (Here’s the one I just got: “The secret of the universe arises and subsides in descriptions of truth.”)

Journalist Danny Casolaro swore to his friends that he’d stumbled upon something big — a massive conspiracy at the heart of the US government, spanning the globe. His life, he believed, was in danger. But what happened next — and what, exactly, is “The Octopus”

Wolfgang Halbig, a former Florida State Trooper and school principal, asks questions about the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting during the public participation section of the Board of Education meeting at the Newtown Municipal Center Council Chambers in Newtown, Conn. Tuesday, May 6, 2014. Photo: Tyler Sizemore

NEWTOWN — They came and they spoke, but their words fell flat with a respectful but thoroughly disgusted audience.

A dozen or so self-described skeptics of official accounts of the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting appeared Tuesday night at the Board of Education meeting, each taking the allotted three minutes to address pointed questions to board members.

Wolfgang Halbig, the most prominent member of the group, raised questions about everything from the scale of police response that day to their refusal to accept his expert help in analyzing the event. He suggested that his legitimate efforts to get answers have been thwarted, and accused board members of toeing an official line.

But board members refused to take the bait, remaining silent throughout presentations by Halbig and several of his supporters who followed him to the microphone. The audience, which included First Selectman Pat Llodra and several other town officials who had come to support the board, also stayed silent.

The only public response came from Newtown resident Jim Fitzpatrick, who was the last to speak. Unable to let this group have the last word, he said, “It’s a shame to see this circus come to town, and I’m offended by the people who have come, and these conspiracy theories. Newtown has conducted itself wonderfully.”

He was greeted with a round of light applause, quickly waved silent by board Chairwoman Debbie Leidlein.

That may sound like a contradiction, but apparently it isn’t. One of the lessons Jenny, my Reiki master, taught my class when we first gathered in her small, purple classroom in La Crescenta, California, was this:

“Belief is irrelevant. You don’t have to believe a single word I say. If you have the Reiki energy and even the vaguest intention to heal, it will work.”

Now I had paid $350 to learn the “ancient” technique myself in a class called “Reiki 1-2.” But, contrary to popular myth, Reiki isn’t all that ancient. This hands-on healing method was developed by Mikao Usui just shy of one hundred years ago. The stories are not entirely clear, but the general idea is that he went up on a mountain top in Japan, fasted, and ended up receiving special healing energy from the Heavens, which he then passed down to his students. Reiki is hugely popular in the United States, where you can find a healer in nearly every city. During a Reiki treatment, you can expect your practitioner to wave his or her hands over you, often without even touching you, to heal your body, mind, and spirit. The National Institutes of Health warn that Reiki hasn’t been thoroughly studied and should never replace conventional health care.[1] Our best bet, my instructor told us, was to always assume that whoever we were dealing with was skeptical of Reiki. And plenty of people are.

When I told Jenny I didn’t know whether I thought Reiki was real myself, she said, “Oh, perfect! People who believe in Reiki are so boring. Skeptics are so much fun! Skeptics are the easiest to work with, because they want to be fair. Just go through the motions, and let them tell you if it worked. Pretend you know what you’re doing.”

The six of us students looked at our hands, which would soon be divine instruments.

“This is a metaphysical software download,” Jenny said. “It works as long as you have the software.”

Jenny explained that everyone’s hands have some healing energy, but 10–20 percent of the population have enough to be healers already. People who get the special healing Reiki energy (passed down from Usui to every other master and student since Reiki’s birth) have the strongest, most divinely guided healing powers possible. And receiving the two “attunements” we would get in this class meant having “Super Hands” forever. It couldn’t be undone. Jenny had guided this process many times, training 2,000 students, ages five to one hundred, over twenty-three years.

For the most part, Jenny seemed like a warm, intelligent woman who defied my expectations of a Reiki teacher at every turn. She studied biology in college and was staunchly pro-GMO. Although she wore a fair amount of green and purple, her outfit was simple and all-American. Her long, brown hair was cut in straight bangs, and she was as glued to her iPhone as everyone else in the class. Besides her odd habit of saying “yesterday” instead of “tomorrow”—“We’ll learn about animal Reiki yesterday”—she was downright normal.

When it came time to receive the sacred Reiki attunements, we all sat in a circle, closed our eyes, and waited for Jenny to walk around the outer edge of our chairs, giving the six of us the holy energy one at a time. I was sitting with my hands in prayer position, centering myself and focusing on the holy energy within me already, though what I felt most strongly was a longing for the Thai restaurant next door. She reached in front of me and grasped my palms with hers, lifting my arms above my head. Then she patted my crown three times, whistled a strange tune, and touched my back. That was it. I now had partial Reiki powers.

When we opened our eyes, my classmates and I exchanged notes. Richard felt his heart become heavy and his hunger go away upon receiving the energy. Mary felt lightning bolts in her head. Tasha felt vulnerable, like wings had popped open on her back, exposing her spine. Priscilla, a physical therapist, said she was relieved she could finally be a true healer. Pablo and I were the only ones who didn’t feel much. Jenny said all our experiences were equal. We didn’t need to feel anything.

Now that we had received half of the full Reiki energy, we practiced on each other. First, the class tried to cure my headaches by feeling for lumps in the energy field above my head. I was as lumpy-headed as my teacher had expected. My fellow students all stood above me, their hands miming the removal of stagnant energy about three inches above my skull.

Many identical twins — perhaps as many as one in five — claim to share a special psychic connection. About one out of every 30 babies born in the United States is a twin, and identical twins are especially interesting because they have the same genes and are alike in many ways. Brothers and sisters can be close, but some twins claim to know what the other is thinking or feeling. It’s an intriguing idea, but what’s the truth behind it? Coincidence, psychic powers or something else?

This sort of psychological connection isn’t necessarily mysterious, of course: any two people who know each other very well and who have shared many common experiences — including non-twin siblings, old married couples, and even best friends — may complete each other’s sentences and have a pretty good idea about what the other person is thinking.

The idea of twin telepathy has been around for well over a century. It appears, for example, in the 1844 Alexandre Dumas novella “The Corsican Brothers.” It tells the story of two once-conjoined brothers who were separated at birth yet even as adults continue to share not only thoughts but also physical sensations. As one twin describes, “However far apart we are now we still have one and the same body, so that whatever impression, physical or mental, one of us perceives has its after-effects on the other.” The 2013 best-selling novel “Sisterland” by Curtis Sittenfeld also tells the story of twin girls who share a psychic connection.

Most of the evidence for twin telepathy is not scientific but instead anecdotal.

This mysterious code representing vigilante justice has a history steeped in mystery.

Woe be unto he that attracts the ire of the Montana Highway Patrol, or to the enemy that finds himself in the crosshairs of a fighter plane of the Montana Air National Guard. For all these uniforms bear a symbol steeped in antiquity and mystery alike: the code 3-7-77. What does it mean? Those who wear it claim only that they don’t know; but legend says the riddle is known to those in years past who were shown the symbol just before dying at the hands of the Montana Vigilance Committee.

The State of Montana is not best known for its warm embrace of Federal interference. People in Montana tend to like to have things their own way. Threatening a Montanan on his own property is not likely to go well for you; many still consider their sidearm to be the most efficient form of justice. In the 19th century, when no meaningful law had penetrated that far west, your sidearm was likely to be your only justice. And when the enemy was many, or more than one person or town could handle, Montanans and other Westerners developed their own form of law that protected the public interest with maximum efficiency. They were called vigilance committees. Frontier justice was not slowed by bureaucracy or derailed by official trivialities. It was swift, comprehensive, not subject to appeal, and almost always found at the end of a rope.

The origin of 3-7-77 has been debated by Montanans ever since it became publicly known in the late 19th century, but its meaning is clear: